Posts published in “Idaho”

Primary elections in Idaho are not only about political parties. School districts, and the students they serve, typically have a big stake in them too.

And uneasy sit any sweeping predictions about what the voters in those districts will do.

This year, in the tally assembled by the Idaho Ed News, around the state 24 supplemental levies won voter approval, and four failed. Some plant facilities levies failed too.

Two districts, at Kimberly and Rockland, asked voters for bonding authority for building additions and renovation. Neither came close to passing; in Rockland only about a third of voters were in favor while in Kimberly only about 14% voted yes. That's of a piece with recent history; in the last couple of years just one school bond proposal out of 15 has passed, and it succeeded only after its district (Salmon) had tried a dozen in times in a row unsuccessfully to get the money to fix some extremely unsafe and unhealthy conditions at schools there.

These different categories of funding measures - and there are more than that: Idaho’s school funding system can be, from a taxpayer's point of view, a complicated mess - have different kinds of track records when it comes to passage. (Remember that all of them reach the ballot only after locally elected school boards sign off on them.) The money for all comes from property taxes.

These various types of levies have different rules concerning how the money is raised and how it can be used. The greatest needs often fall in the category of major building or renovations, and those improvements can make a big difference in learning and even test scores.

Education Week magazine concluded “facilities improvements such as HVAC system replacements and plumbing and furnace upgrades can lead to statistically significant test score increases equivalent to 10 percent of the gap between high- and low-income districts’ academic outcomes. In other words, the right kind of school facility upgrade can effectively close 10 percent of the academic achievement gap between high- and low-wealth school districts.”

And often to pay for those, you need bonding authority. Supplemental or plant levies often will not do the job.

And here’s the catch: While supplemental levies need for passage only a simple majority (50% of the vote plus one), and plant facilities generally need 55%, bonds need the extremely high approval bar of two-thirds of the vote - 66.7%. That’s really tough, frequently over the years a killer requirement, since each negative vote counts twice as much as every yes vote.

Idaho is a major outlier on this. A 2023 study found that while three states and the District of Columbia require no election for bonds at all, most do and require a simple majority. Those simple-majority states include Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and Oregon. Of the others, 10 states require affirmative votes of from 55% to 60%; one of those is Washington state, where the 60% requirement has been under attack by activists for years. But only Idaho requires more than that.

Lowering the threshold to 50% or maybe a little more wouldn't, of course, guarantee bond passage. Many of them would fail anyway, as witness this year’s Rockland and Kimberly requests. But bear in mind that many of those supplemental levies, which require only a simple majority, do in fact pass.

But the proposal at least wouldn’t seem so far out of reach for so many. And you wouldn’t think, even in Idaho, that building and maintaining decent schools would be so terribly controversial.

On the other hand, take it to the Idaho Legislature and see what happens.

 

Of all the primary election results in Idaho this week, the one that jumped out at me was not in a contest for senator or governor or any federal, state or local government office at all.

It was for a humble county-level party precinct committee election, the lowest-level and usually least-noticed contests on the ballot, in just one of many hundreds of voting precincts in the state. Unless you’re really active somehow in politics, you probably don’t know the names of your precinct committee representatives (assuming those spots even are filled where you are). Most people don’t.

But they can be important, and the incumbent on the ballot in this case, named Brent Regan, is the best such example in the state. He has been an elected member of the county central committee since 2014, and much of that time as chair. Under his leadership the central committee has become so powerful in Kootenai County across a wide range of political and social areas as to become a dominating force. Regan for years has been one of the leading figures in Idaho Republican politics, closely aligned with the state party leadership, the Idaho Freedom Foundation and the more hardline conservative legislators and other public officials.

So here’s the shocker: On Tuesday, Regan lost that precinct office to a dental anesthesiologist named Rick Montandon, and possibly (not certainly) with it his chairmanship, by 14 votes.

That was not the only change on the central committee, though a few weeks probably will be needed to settle what direction it will take next, and who will lead it. The committee is scheduled for a full meeting on May 28.

In Kootenai County, many people are likely to see this as the end of a political era. They could be right. But in context it looks more like a break in what has been a steady rightward ideological shift, in that county and in the state. The Idaho primary election as a whole seemed to say much the same.

Some early reaction to the results included pronouncements that state politics - meaning for this purpose the Republican Party - had shifted to the point of going into reverse, heading back toward the center and empowering mainstream candidates and officials. (I’ll use here the “mainstream” and “hardline” descriptions that  seem to have caught on of late; substitute your own if you prefer.) You can find evidence for that.

Don’t bother looking for significant evidence in any of the top-of-ballot races, such as they were; the incumbents in the top offices all drew opposition, but none of it was strong enough to come remotely close to seriously threatening any of the incumbents.  Look rather to legislative races, and below.

Maybe the strongest such result was the renomination of Senator Jim Guthrie of McCammon, who was challenged from the hardline side (his race reverberated statewide) after he stood up to that faction on the Senate floor.

But there is much more. The hardcore Gang of Eight is down to a Gang of Three after the primary. Around southern Idaho quite a few from that side either lost their seats, or lost bids to defeat mainstreamers.

The story does not end there, however. You may notice that all these races were in southern Idaho. Up north, several premiere Republican contests went the hardliners’ way. Look for example at Senate District 1 (where Scott Herndon beat Jim Woodward, a reversal of their match in 2024, which reversed their match in 2022 …) and Senate District 6, where very hardline Dan Foreman turned back a strong challenge from Representative Lori McCann. The string of hardline wins in the north goes on from there, the Regan precinct loss notwithstanding.

For those Republican mainstreamers wondering whether the hardcore right tide could ever be pushed back, this election doesn’t constitute a loud shout. But it does equate to a measured: Not easily but yes, it can.

 

If Idahoans want to look at an important part of today’s top political headlines and evaluate how their state stacks up on that front, they can justifiably say at least in one area: We’re among the best.

At least have been. Maybe will continue to be.

The subject is redistricting, which used to be a hot topic (among political junkies if not most people) just once for a brief time every ten years, and only then. Now reapportionment has become a never-ending battle that makes our already junky standards for politics even worse.

The drawing of lines between political districts for purposes of electoral advantage is almost as old as voting. The word gerrymander, either as a noun or verb, referring to corrupt mapping of districts for political gain, goes back to this nation’s founding and a genuinely illustrious founder: Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the fifth vice president of the nation. He was also governor of Massachusetts and as such signed a state redistricting law including a legislative district so twisty its critics compared it to a salamander, rather, a gerrymander.

As then in Massachusetts, legislatures over the years have done much of the work of remapping districts, which has to be done to keep up with changes in population. (Point of interest: Look up the state legislative district map for the 1970s and compare it to today, and see the fast-declining number of rural districts compared to urban.)

Legislators, having personal interests in these maps - what politician wouldn’t want to choose his own voters? - have in many places often succumbed to the temptation in redrawing districts to benefit themselves or their parties. Sometimes the maps are so bad they’re thrown out by courts.

After the 1980 census the Idaho legislative redistricting process was unusually bitter, and after the 1982 election the Idaho Supreme Court 86’d it and imposed its own, an odd (some thought bizarre) plan that imposed two layers of legislators, one regional and one more local, increasing the number of legislators overall to 126 compared to the 105 the state otherwise has had since the mid-1960s.

Following that fiasco, support grew for turning redistricting over to an independent, bipartisan commission. In 1994 voters approved that idea in a change to the constitution. While some legislators from time to time have explored the idea of retaking control of the process, the commission seems to have general support.  Idaho today is one of the 21 states with some kind of redistricting commission, along with such nearby states as Washington, Montana and California.

The commission system does work well. In Idaho, the maps from these commissions usually generate disagreements from someone, but that’s probably inevitable: The shape of the state and the contours of its population mean that at least a few counter-intuitive districts probably are inevitable. Overall, the maps have been reasonable.

They’ve been fair too on a partisan level: Idaho’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature isn’t that way because of how the districts are drawn, but rather because Idaho just has a lot of Republican-leaning voters. If anything, it would be more possible to draw maps that wipe out most of the few small scraps of territory (Boise and some smaller-population areas) where legislative Democrats do have an advantage. (Idaho’s two congressional districts both already are so Republican there’s almost no way to draw a map to make either of them much less so.)

Therein, in today’s environment, runs the risk: There’s now a growing movement among high partisans (mostly but not exclusively Republican) to wipe out every trace of the opposition, wherever possible. Watch the headlines and you’ll see it in places like South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana. In Washington state, where Democrats already hold eight of the 10 congressional seats, there’s some talk about trying to add a ninth, by splitting the super-Democratic Seattle area between a half-dozen or more districts. (No, it’s not likely to actually happen.)

Start down that road and madness ensues, and a whole lot of people who feel unrepresented start to sue, and worse.

Idaho can avoid all that simply by keeping in place the smarter approach it already has.

 

In Idaho, eight candidates are competing for the Republican nomination for governor. More or less: “Competing” isn’t exactly the right word.

Count it as close to a certainty as politics gets that Brad Little, the incumbent and twice the party’s nominee for the office (not to mention a two-time general election winner), will prevail in this month’s primary election. He has vastly more money than any of the others, and more than that he is far better known, has strong organizational support, an experienced campaign structure and more.

You could ask the same of the little-known Republican candidates for the three congressional offices, where the incumbents are about as certain to win their nominations again. (I say “nearly” only out of a point of rigor: Nothing absolutely happens until it happens.) And much of all this applies to other non-Republican candidates too.)

So if there is no plausible chance of winning, what do the other seven contenders think - assuming they’re not delusional - they’re doing?

There can be rational reasons. You could run as a protest candidate, to express disapproval of the frontrunner and bring criticisms to a wider audience. Or to shine a spotlight, or at least light a match,illuminate an idea or cause not getting needed attention.

Taken on that level, let’s quickly run through these GOP governor contenders, with an assist from an efficient May 6 overview in the Idaho Ed News.

Mark Fitzpatrick, maybe the best known of the group and certainly holder of the largest campaign treasury (after Little), has spoken on some standard-issue Republican issues like “waste, fraud and corruption.” But his focus seems better represented in his profile on the state Republican Party website: “Mark Fitzpatrick is a faith driven husband, father of six, retired police officer, successful entrepreneur, and owner of Old State Saloon in Eagle, Idaho, along with a wedding venue dedicated to celebrating traditional marriage. A lifelong Republican from a conservative law enforcement family, he homeschools his children and stands as a bold culture warrior. He founded ‘Heterosexual Awesomeness Month’ to champion biblical family design and has pursued other unapologetic conservative initiatives that gained global viral attention.”

Okay. I think we got it.

Daniel Fowler came to Idaho in 2020 and spoke of wanting to “fix” public schools, with tax vouchers being a help toward that end.

Ethan Giles said on the state GOP website, “I’m running for Governor to clean up our state debt.

We must reverse those tax cuts that gave our surplus away! We must also redirect the school voucher program into Special Education.” He may want to do a little more research on state finances; while there’s plenty to criticize in Idaho tax policy, the state government is not running a deficit, partly because it cannot under the state constitution. But that seems to be his cause.

Justin Plante is a mechanic from Kimberly, and his concern seems broader: “All I’ve done is fix things my whole life. The government’s no different.”

Lisa Marie of Eagle, a second-time candidate for governor, is an advocate for missing children.

Ron James is the one in this group who holds a public office, that of Teton County commissioner. He also probably comes closest to being an in-party rebel, saying Little hasn’t been communicative and legislators vote for their ideology rather than their constituents. Like Marie, he didn’t have a page on the state Republican website.

Sean Calvert Crystal may be the most interesting of the bunch. His party website page focuses on his conservative views (“I believe in limited government, personal responsibility, accountability, and protecting individual freedoms”) but there’s only a glancing allusion to his business in Idaho Falls: 710 Spectrum, which its website says “aspires to illuminate the path to quality, affordability, and excellence in the cannabis world.”

None of them, by the way, seem to have anything to say about President Trump.

It’s a varied group, though. A vote for any of them would send a message. Choose carefully.

 

When I arrived for new student orientation at the University of Idaho in August 1974, the second person I met, welcoming us all on the tour bus, was the new student president, Dirk Kempthorne. He was a great greeter - really, my introducer to Idaho.

From right then I could tell: To the degree people simply have innate political and campaigning talents, you could see them in Kempthorne, who died on April 24. Over the next academic year I observed him in my role as a student newspaper reporter covering the student government. The idea that he might end up in higher office in the “real world” was thought a possibility.

To meet him at any point in his adult life was to encounter a courteous, self-possessed, able communicator well capable of navigating whatever social waters he encountered. He really was well suited for politics.

What I didn’t know on orientation day but learned later was that Kempthorne already had been through a political wringer. The February student election was contentious, with Kempthorne facing initially one opponent, Jeff Stoddard, then a third entry, Rod Gramer (in the years since a prominent regional journalist and education advocate). Kempthorne was a plurality and not a majority winner, and the question of what might have happened if Gramer had not entered - as in many such cases - has been hashed over ever since by those who were around at the time.

But there was more. After the election a student activist named John Orwick filed a petition saying the election rules had been violated (he didn’t allege any candidate was responsible) with the implication that the election results should be thrown out. That wrangling went on for weeks until time came to swear in the new student officers, and at that point Orwick agreed to drop the challenge. His pullback followed discussions with Kempthorne which convinced him the new president would work to change and improve the election process (which he did). Kempthorne announced that decision, adding, "John decided to withdraw his petition so the people who took the oath of office tonight wouldn't have to worry about being bounced out of office.”

Over the years ahead, Kempthorne seemed to have the golden touch in Idaho politics, reaching a succession of offices - Boise mayor, U.S. senator, Idaho governor, Interior secretary - no one else has matched.

That does not mean it was all automatic. Sometimes he happened to be in the right place at the right time. And some of it involved something more.

Kempthorne’s political trajectory really began with his successful race for Boise mayor in 1985. But that candidacy did not come out of nowhere. It emerged from what was then a roiling stew of Boise politics, over the unlikely subject of downtown redevelopment: The leaders of city hall had one vision for how that should proceed, and an increasingly large and popular opposition had another. That well-organized opposition won two seats on the Boise City council in 1983, and was poised for a takeover in 1985. Its leadership picked out a slate of contenders from across the political spectrum. A key question: Who should they choose for mayor? Maybe someone new, who could project well across a wide range of people?

Dirk Kempthorne, who was just one among several serious prospects, emerged from that selection process, and he was an excellent choice. His run for mayor - helped by riding a popular insurgency - was smooth and efficient. After he won, his tenure as mayor won widespread applause, and he remarkably won re-election unopposed. His elections to the Senate and the governorship were not surprising.

From a distance, all of this would look easy, and in hindsight, almost foreordained.

But the point here is that even in the case of well-timed political talent, there are hinges that can swing either way, and can choke off a path of progress as easily as enable it. Dirk Kempthorne seemed to understand those hinges, in politics and often in government as well, well. He was able to make a difference as a result.

 

Tuesday’s election in Virginia over adopting a redistricted - gerrymandered - congressional district map was, whatever else, dramatic. As the vote trickled in over a couple of hours, it stayed close almost always, and while the “no” side narrowly led most of the time, the “yes” side eventually prevailed.

Idaho doesn’t have a lot of election nights like that anymore, but the primary election about a month from now does have some unpredictability about it, and some races that could be close in the Republican primary, where most of the action will be.

A bunch of contests have emerged pitting two clear sides against each other, mainstream candidates against the harder-edged contenders aligned with the state party structure. Both have scored wins in recent years; in 2024, the state party side seemed to get the better of it. This year, especially in the Magic Valley, we’ll see if a pushback attempt succeeds.

One of those contests stands out for the stark choices involved and the unmistakability of whatever the voters decide. That is the race for the Senate in District 6, which includes Moscow, part of Lewiston, and rural areas around them.

It’s a district that in theory might have been designed for something resembling moderation, but has not turned out to be. Moscow is nearly central, but its university community is offset by a large religious group development. The district’s senator is third-term Republican Dan Foreman of Moscow. His challenger is Lori McCann of Lewiston, a Republican House member appointed in 2021 and elected twice since.

Don’t let the party label fool you: They could hardly be more different, a description with which they’d both probably agree.

Foreman’s history doesn’t sound like the makings of a political success story, though he’s been elected repeatedly in a competitive area. Reportedly, he has shouted at constituents (notably students) who tried to talk with him at the Statehouse; among other things he was reported as saying “abortion is murder.”. He has said of his home area, “Latah County, particularly the university, greater Moscow area, is a cesspool of liberalism.” During a candidate forum in the 2024 election he told a fellow candidate, a member of the Nez Perce Tribe, to “go back to where you came from.” (Foreman has denied saying it, but others at the meeting said he did.)

His legislative record is, mostly, on the edge of where even current Idaho Republican caucuses are willing to go. He does not support any space between church and state, considers climate change a “scam” and has introduced legislation to make abortion first degree murder. The whole record (including in the recent session acting against a measure designed to cripple the Idaho Education Association) is a little more complex than that, but you get the drift. He has been well liked by the state Republican organization and the influential Idaho Freedom Foundation.

McCann, on the other hand, has been a backer of public schools and higher education and notably the University of Idaho - usually an ordinary thing in a district home to a large state university, but not a given these days. She was quoted: “Some Idaho legislators believe higher education should be defunded. I do not.” (She was quoted as saying Foreman’s IEA bill actions were motivated by the upcoming primary election against her.) She has been a defender of public libraries too, and generally has not joined in the culture wars that have attracted so many Republican legislators in recent years.

For her actions in some of these areas, local and state Republican organizations have criticized her and even set up a “platform enforcement” hearing to decide whether she had been sufficiently faithful to the state Republican platform.

All that is background to her complaints about being able to work with Foreman, or even talking with him: “We can’t get in to see him. We’re not getting replies back.”

Two well-established Republican legislators in the same district so sharply at odds in policy and approach make for a highly unusual primary contest. The results will have a lot to say about what this section of Idaho is all about.

And something to say about in general too.

 

A while ago I wrote about legislative bad intentions, those on the part of many legislators to attack members of specific groups (in that case, sexual and gender minorities). But as the last legislative session recedes into the rear view mirror, and new laws go into effect, we should think too about what better intentions also bring, where the consequences of the legislature aren’t well enough thought through.

Today’s instance: House Bill 541, passed by the Idaho Legislature and signed into law by the governor on April 2.

Backed by Senator Cindy Carlson and Representative Jarom Crane, R-Nampa, both Republicans, the bill requires “Covered Social Media platforms to obtain parental consent in order to maintain accounts for children aged 16 years old and under, and to refrain from presenting addictive interface design features to such children.” The “covered” platforms generally are those operated by companies generating a billion dollars a year in gross revenue worldwide.

Several other states have moved forward on this,  South Carolina and Kentucky among them.

Say this up front: Carlson and Crane have identified a real and massive problem state legislatures around the country (not to mention Congress too) should be tackling, as some have been. They’re taking a serious stab at addressing it. The specific problem of “addiction of children to social media” is widespread and damaging. And we know that in places where use of social media by young people actually has been curtailed, as in many schools around the country, positive results consistently have been reported.

Social media companies profit from online addiction, of adults and children both, and they have no incentive to scale back their use by younger people. The risks, ranging from invasion of privacy and doxxing incidents to sexual harassment and much more, are real too.

How would this new bill work? Here’s one simplified description of the national template: it would “require that children under the age of 16 receive consent when creating a social media account. If the child tries to get around this, the platform will boot the user off until parental consent is given.” Another description adds that “Social media platforms must use age estimation technology (which they already admit to using) to identify users who are 15 or younger.”

But will this actually work?

While the bill passed overwhelmingly in the House, 14 senators - an eclectic group of Democrats and various shades of Republicans - voted against.

In the Senate State Affairs Committee on March 13, one advocate against the bill made the points (as the minutes record) about “Harms to small businesses; privacy concerns with providing sensitive personal information to platforms for verification; Concerns that this legislation undermined safety efforts and created inconsistent rules across platforms; unconstitutional restrictions on speech and content; unique family dynamics and the inability for platforms to determine who a child's parent was.”

Age estimation technology is out there and social media companies have it, but its reliability is uncertain. It uses patterns an algorithm thinks suggest a younger user, and users of social media sites can fake a lot of their inputs. (Might it entangle adult users too?) Might it turn into yet another way for social media companies to hoover up information about us all? There are unclear and significant legal issues here.

Imagine a mega-social media corporation digging sufficiently into sometimes complicated family structures to find out who parents are and exactly how old certain minor users of the platform might be.

And who on the state level will enforce it? And how will they accomplish it?

Doesn’t sound as if we have the silver bullet in hand yet.

Carlson and Crane deserve credit for at least trying to deal with one of our more perplexing problems (something too few legislators spent much time with this session). And if this bill isn’t the final answer, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying. Sometimes flawed legislation is what you have to get through to make your way to what does work.

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Winter is over.

You can tell it by the calendar, of course, and by the warm weather. But make that warmer weather.

The warm will turn to hot in coming months. Which it always does, only this time more so than usual. And as it does, water will grow scarce. Yes, this is almost certain to be a serious drought year.

It probably won’t hit Idaho worst among the western states. Oregon, Nevada and Arizona might be drying harder, and Washington similarly. But Idaho is going to be slammed.

You can see local details on the federal Snotel maps, which show among other things how much snowpack is available. That’s the crucial thing to know. The last half-year hasn’t been completely parched; there’s been periodic rainfall around Idaho, and around the west generally. The problem is that not a lot of precipitation has fallen, or been retained in upper elevations, as snow. This means most of the water has simply run through a lot of the system, and not enough - or at least as much as we would like - will be retained for use through the coming warmer months.

Which, critically, are the months irrigators most need them for producing crops.

The current Snotel maps show not the amount of snow-water available in raw terms, but in comparison to historical averages (specifically, 1991-2020). The maps are published daily and change over time, and those early in the “water year” (which begins October 1) sometimes fluctuate wildly. But by this time of year, they’ve mostly begun to settle down to provide reliable and useful numbers.

Compared, then, to the historical average, the highest and best percentage recorded in any of the basins, as of the April 7 map, is the Big Lost River at 71%. Two big systems in northern Idaho, the Clearwater and the Coeur d’Alene-St. Joe, are each at 70%. The Little Lost is at 64%. Those numbers are lower than you’d like, but not exactly awful.

But then we have the Owyhee and Goose Creek basins at 0% - a relative rarity to report essentially no snowpack at all. Willow-Blackfoot-Portneuf report 9%, Salmon Falls 16%, Bruneau 17%.

The Weiser, Payette, Boise, Big and Little Wood, the Salmon and the Bear basins are notching figures higher than that, but still only in the range of around half, or a little over, the norm. (Maybe a little ironically, the Lost basins are the site of a major state groundwater curtailment, though the reasons are unusual and have to do with jointly managing water in the region.)

If you check these basin numbers a few days in the future, you may find they have changed, a little. But the odds are they won’t much change in a positive direction.

These observations aren’t going unnoticed. They’re of course being watched closely by the Idaho Department of Water Resources, which holds periodic meetings (most recently this week) of a Water Supply Committee.

A site called plantmaps tracks drought and dryness on local levels, and concluded that as of the end of March, “approximately 69% (57313 square miles) of Idaho is under drought conditions and 31% (26136 square miles) is Abnormally dry.” The worst of it, the map showed, is in Owyhee County, but drought seems to extend across much of the rest of the state, including most of the more heavily populated areas. Coeur d’Alene, Pocatello and Twin Falls all were listed under “severe drought.”

By the end of March, Cassia County had asked for a drought declaration there. More like it are probable before long.

The federal drought.gov monitor estimated “882,100 Idaho residents in areas of drought.”

Buckle down. Political campaign season in Idaho is about to coincide with another season just as challenging.

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